The following excerpt is from United States v. McCoy, No. 16-591-cr (2nd Cir. 2017):
We review the denial of a mistrial for abuse of discretion, which we will identify only where there is an error of fact or law or the denial "cannot be located within the range of permissible decisions." United States v. Yannai, 791 F.3d 226, 242 (2d Cir. 2015). This is not such a case. The district court struck the government's single-sentence reference to the out-of-record fact and instructed the jury that it could consider only facts in evidence in its deliberations. Before the jury, the government conceded its error and reiterated that the jury was limited to considering facts in evidence. McCoy points to no error in this instruction or to any reason for us to think that the jury did not abide by it. See United States v. Binday, 804 F.3d at 592 (upholding conviction where curative instruction "guarded against precisely the prejudice" alleged). Moreover, because the improper statement concerned only the audiotape's enhancement, not its purportedly incriminating content, it could not have materially affected the ultimate outcome of the case. The district court therefore did not
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exceed its discretion in addressing the error through a curative instruction rather than granting a mistrial.
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